Imagine a pool in your backyard, as large as a football field and covered with the state of the art ceramic. A true sign of wealth, isn't it? Well, Mayan people, far from wealthy population, have had it in the middle of the jungle some 1,500 years ago.
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Since 2009, researchers from Germany and Mexico have been systematically uncovering and mapping the old walls of Uxul, a Mayan city in the Mexican rainforest. In the process, they also came across two, about 100 meters square water reservoirs. Such monster pools, which are also known from other Mayan cities, are called "aguadas." Similar to present-day water towers, they served to store drinking water.
But the people of Uxul seem to have thought of a particularly smart way to seal their aguada. Scientists conducted a trial dig in the centre of one of the water reservoirs and found that the bottom, which is at a depth of two meters, was covered with ceramic shards practically without any gaps. And Mayans built it about 1,500 years ago.
If the entire poll is covered with such precisely lined ceramics, that would be a big surprise due to the quantity of ceramics required. The aguadas in Uxul were each as large as ten Olympic-size pools. Maybe there used to be even more artificial lakes. After all, the precious commodity had to be enough to last a population of at least 2,000 through the three months of dry season.
The Mayan word "uxul" means "at the end" in English. Karl Ruppert and John H. Denison from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who discovered the city, had named it that in 1934, exhausted and sick after a long expedition through the jungles of Mexico's Yucatán peninsula. The city's original name remains unknown to this day. If Uxul was "at the end of the world" in the 1930's, not much has changed today. You can only get to the ruins via 120 km of jungle paths clear across the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, far from modern roads and settlements.
What is becoming more and more obvious as the excavations progress is the fact that Uxul was nowhere near "at the end" or isolated in the jungle during its peak in 250 to 900 A.D. Uxul was located in a densely populated area between the big Mayan cities of El Mirador to the south and Calakmul to the northeast. It had trade connections as far as present-day southern Guatemala and the Central Mexican Plateau.
Uxul is already surrounded with many mysteries and there is a lot to be discovered about it. And now there is another one: Where all the material came from? Who made floor tiles with such accuracy? Who came to that idea? Are somewhere true swimming pools? OK, that's more than one question but now you see: one solutions leads to many questions. Who knows, maybe there was a Premier Water Polo League... ■